In The Age of Discontent, Ralph Brauer provides a revisionist view of late-nineteenth-century history that credits Main Street, not Wall Street, with laying the foundations of modern America. Read on for a Q&A with the author to learn more about this book.

How did you come to focus on the Geary family as a case study for the difficulties of the Age of Discontent?

The suicide of Sarah Geary was a central part of an article by Knights of Labor leader Terence Powderly titled “The Army of the Discontented.” Trying to understand Sarah’s death led to thirteen years of research into the late nineteenth century. As I found other similar examples and uncovered overlooked studies, the story of the Geary family came to personify the hardships faced by the Discontented including starvation and other health crises, capricious wages, unacceptable living and working conditions, political violence, and the lack of a social safety net. Whenever I became discouraged during the years of writing and research, I thought about the Geary family and the imperative of telling their story and those of others like them.

You mention Title IX and Pell Grants as modern examples of the government’s duty to maintain fairness or equality. What lessons could we take away from the Discontented to improve our current society?

In reinventing our country, the Discontented implemented a systemic strategy of increasing aid and access to education, stimulating the supply side through subsidizing infrastructure and telecommunications, supplementing the demand side by increasing discretionary income, and providing for fair and open markets along with a process to referee the results. This strategy remains relevant today.

Democracy requires everyone to make sacrifices. If we do not believe enough in ourselves to make those sacrifices, we do not believe in democracy. If we lack the courage to protect it, we lose it.

What gap in the current literature on the Discontented does this work fill?

Actually, this is the first book to focus on the Discontented by giving them a name and documenting their achievements. It also does away with a term that grates me like squeaky chalk on a blackboard, the Gilded Age, by coining a new term for the years from 1870 to 1890.

Using an interdisciplinary systemic approach, my book challenges the longstanding belief still prevalent in textbooks and political rhetoric that tycoons and laissez-faire capitalism were mainly responsible for overcoming the difficulties of the late nineteenth century.